Rating: R
Run Time: 102 minutes
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blout, Jameson Parker
In Prince of Darkness, Satan is extraterrestrial subatomic antimatter
composed of a large clear cylinder full of swirling green fluorescent fluid…and
he’s trying to bring his dad back from the “Dark Side.” Jesus, beyond merely trying to lead us to
salvation by demonstrating for us the supreme sacrifice, also tried to tell us
about the green shit in the form of a series of writings that were transcribed
over and over again in different languages.
Oh, and the green stuff is emitting data in the form of extremely
complicated differential equations that were not thought to exist in the day
this substance dates from.
Now, the heretofore
dormant green shit is beginning to stir, it seems, and John Carpenter’s
favorite doom-monger, Donald Pleasance, this time a priest and not a
psychiatrist, has begun to sound the death alarums in that demonstration of
muted hysteria that only Donald Pleasance can do. Who does he call upon to forestall the end
times? Not any religious group, but two
academic researchers and a group of their graduate students. What do they hope to accomplish? Well, I don’t know. What they do is bring in their sophisticated
equipment and begin to analyze the mystery.
Prince
of Darkness/POD
is the second of Carpenter’s self-titled apocalypse trilogy, after the The Thing and before In the Mouth of Madness. Given that they were released in 1982, 1987,
and 1995, and considering that the thematic similarities are really only
tenuous, I think it is safe to say there was little or no conscious design on
Carpenter’s part at the time to link these films in any substantive way. It’s easy to suggest the connection at a
later time, and I do not doubt Carpenter has an affinity for films whose plot
elements include the potential for ultimate annihilation (not only the
so-called trilogy, but most of his
other films suggest, even if ostensibly on a smaller scale, that the stakes are
higher than just the immediacy of the plot his protagonists are involved in: The Fog, They Live, the Escape from…
movies; even Assault on Precinct 13 has
that apocalyptic quality to it).
Unfortunately, already in
1987, Carpenter’s star was on the decline, at least in the sense that, after
the box-office failure of his greatest film and the commercial success of the
simpler Starman, Hollywood now seemed
to trust him only to make movies of more limited thematic ambition on similarly
reduced budgets. I do not know if this
is the
period during which it is said that he returned to “small” filmmaking,
but it is certainly a small film, albeit one with very large ambitions that
were not ultimately fully realized. Please
don’t understand me; I don’t intend the term “small” in relation to POD to be interpreted in a perjorative sense.
After all, both Halloween and The Fog were small films in terms of their limited budgets, but
they were successful; Halloween is certainly
one of the greatest horror films ever made.
Despite being “small,” however, POD
has a few ideas running around in it, even if I must admit I was not paying
enough attention to discern completely or parse out those ideas.
The opening credit
sequence, complete with another familiar Carpenter score, is intercut with a
series of short scenes introducing many of the faces we will see throughout the
movie. Most notable is Donald Pleasance,
here a priest dealing with the death of a fellow cleric who was apparently the
only remaining staff clergyman at a small, abandoned church in a run-down and
seemingly largely deserted part of Los Angeles.
Except for the homeless; there is an apparently endless and steady
supply of homeless people here (oh, and they are all, without exception,
sufferers of schizophrenia, or at least so says one of the graduate students).
This opening sequence is
well-paced, as is the rest of the movie.
It reveals the stakes involved, if not in elaborate detail then in
general outline, and the players who will be called upon to confront whatever
it is in the abandoned church that has Pleasance’s character’s, Father Tensely
Nervous, frock in a tizzy. The music, in
tandem with the montage of snippet scenes, creates a suspenseful and
anticipatory mood.
Father Fretting Visibly
is a priest in the employ of his Eminence the Cardinal, who is never seen. The old priest dies while waiting to meet
with the cardinal, and Father Mutedly Hysterical examines the two objects the
priest brought with him, a diary and a key.
He uses the key to enter an ancient structure beneath the church that houses
what can only be described as the essence of Evil in liquified form. The diary reveals the existence of a shadowy
sect of priests known as the Brotherhood of Sleep, whose mission it seems is to
keep watch over the dormant liquid, lest it become active and conscious
again. The brotherhood would seem also
to antedate even the Church itself by two million years, during which time its members
arranged for its transference from the Middle East to the New World, enabled by
Spanish conquistadors as efforts were made to proselytize the native dwellers
of California.
Father No Name (I checked
IMDb) seeks the help of physicist and academic, Dr. Howard Birack (huh? He’s
played by Victor Wong, the little Asian actor with the gimp eye, and he doesn’t
look like a Howard Birack; maybe he was adopted), an unbeliever who instead is
a proponent of the idea that the explanations we seek are to be found at the
subatomic level. Given what he read in
the diary, the cleric would seem to agree, and thinks even the answer to the
question of evil’s origin can be explained with recourse to science. He hopes the academics will be able to,
essentially, prove the existence of evil to a non-believing world.
Among these academics are
several graduate students of Birack’s and another professor. Dr. Birack does not share with anyone, at
least initially, the cause for concern that was impressed upon him by Father Pleasance,
so, all those students an academics get to work. Among them is Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker, of
“Simon & Simon” fame) and a whole bunch of other folks whom you may or may
not have seen in other films. Jessie Lawrence Ferguson is Calder, a big, tall
black guy with this creepy laugh-cry he does after his zombification…oops,
spoiler. Sorry.
Well, no sooner do the
academics get their equipment hooked up and running than they discover
something the deceased priest must have instinctively sensed: the liquid is becoming active, changing,
awakening. It calls to the homeless
crowd outside the church, which it has been causing to stir for a while, to
effectively barricade the researchers within, trapping them. It begins to zombify certain team members,
who kill and zombify others, until there is only a small group of survivors who
remain. It selects a surrogate, who has
what looks like a raised burn or infected area on her right upper arm that
looks like an ankh, to be the vessel to contain Satan. He must apparently take corporeal form to
enact what he wants to do: bring back his Father from the Dark Side.
What’s that you say? Satan has a father. Of course, you didn’t know that? You must have missed that CCE lesson. Oh, and Satan and his father are
antimatter. Because if, like, God is
like God God, then, the Anti-Christ
(and his dad) must be the anti-God. And
if God is created of matter (which was not even postulated in this movie, which
no one in this movie ever even suggests was either proven or considered, which is antithetical to
most Christian teaching which suggests God is Spirit, which is entirely unknown
period anyway), well then,
certainly, Satan must be
antimatter. What you just heard was the
sound of me throwing down the bullshit card, because that, my friends, is
bullshit…bullshit.
The idea that, in an
increasingly secular, not necessarily rational, but secular, world, the idea of Ultimate Eeevilll being real and Satan
being it greatest adherent is an outmoded, unsophisticated concept is not only
a product of Enlightenment thinking but a latent byproduct of the
anti-authoritarianism of the 60s and 70s.
If you don’t believe in God, then you certainly don’t believe in the
anti-God either. POD condemns neither the rational-scientific nor the
spiritual. The film demonstrates the two
working harmoniously. In fact, Carpenter
may posit some co-existence between the two forces. There may be a rational explanation for
God. Yet rational and knowable are not
synonymous. And one thing I always
admire about John Carpenter, one attribute of his film making that I love, is
this: his characters are generally resilient and strong; his men and women are
equal to the challenge presented by the adversary; they may not ultimately
triumph, but they will fight and demonstrate courage in extremis.
There is a certain
cynicism that purports to be realism that we see increasingly in modern cinema;
I don’t know if art reflects life or not in this instance. Just as in the realms of spirituality or
religion, the adherents of resistance to the adversary (whatever it be) are
treated with contempt for being naïve and unsophisticated. The nihilism that informs most modern horror,
whether apocalyptic or not, suggests that human weakness is the norm (courage,
whether physical or moral, is merely a chimera). What a dire future there is for us if their
sensibility triumphs.
Oh, and Alice Cooper cameos as one of the homeless people.
